Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: "It's a great day for America"

Craig Ferguson dropped out of high school "mainly to drink," and started in show business as a punk rock drummer, including a stint as bandmate to Peter Capaldi. He drifted toward comedy when he found he enjoyed the between song banter more than pounding the drums.

He performed stand-up and improvisational comedy under the stage name Bing Hitler ("Bing for familiarity and Hitler for shock"), and wrote for a British sketch comedy series, The Russ Abbot Show. In his first TV appearance, he played Confidence in an episode of Red Dwarf. In his first attempt to conquer America, in 1989, he was offered a role as a teacher on High, intended as a high school-themed TV series with Gwyneth Paltrow and Zach Braff among the students, but the pilot episode was unsold and Ferguson returned to Scotland.

He played Brad and sang "Dammit, Janet" in a 1990 West End production of The Rocky Horror Show with Anthony Head as Dr Frank N Furter. In The Craig Ferguson Story, a 1990 special on Britain's Channel 4, he presented his life for laughs, with Peter Cook playing Ferguson's father as a washed-up vaudevillian and an overbearing presence in his son's life. The Craig Ferguson Show was a short-run sketch comedy series in Britain, and he later hosted The Dirt Detective, a BBC educational series on archaeology, and starred in a popular sketch show called The Ferguson Theory.

Poised for stardom in the UK, he decided instead to return to Hollywood, where his European accomplishments meant little -- he was back to auditioning for roles, and there were many more auditions than roles. His first American sitcom was Maybe This Time, but Ferguson was deep in the credits as an unscrupulous cook in a coffee shop, while the show revolved around Marie Osmond as a recent divorcée and Betty White as her worldly-wise mother. He had a recurring but tiny role on Almost Perfect with Nancy Travis, and came to a modicum of American fame when he joined the cast of The Drew Carey Show as Nigel Wick, the evil but lovable boss.

Ferguson has also had artistic if not box office success in movies. He co-wrote and starred in The Big Tease, a 1999 comedy of hairstyles and stylists which Ferguson later confessed was an allegory for his own struggles and yearned-for success in Hollywood. He co-wrote and starred in the marijuana gardening comedy Saving Grace with Brenda Blethyn, and he directed and starred in I'll Be There, a sweet-natured comedy about a faded pop star who discovers that Charlotte Church is his daughter.

When CBS decided that Craig Kilborn was leaving The Late Late Show, Ferguson was tapped to take the slot. After a disastrous first few weeks he made the program his own, with running gags and hilarious impressions of Prince Charles, Sean Connery, Dr. Phil, and Michael Caine, with the latter usually in outer space. Describing himself as a cheeky giant Scottish-American, he displayed an innate knack not just for comedy but for interesting and energetic interviews, where -- unlike most chat show hosts -- he seemed genuinely interested in his guests. He was Emmy-nominated for a 2006 episode where he ditched his usual format and instead made the entire hour a eulogy to his father, who had died the day before. Ferguson left The Late Late Show in 2014, and presently hosts the game show Celebrity Name Game.

He is the author of Between the Bridge and the River, a bizarre, bawdy novel about a hard-drinking Scottish television star who runs from a tabloid-fueled sex scandal on a wild road trip across America. With its illegitimate American half-brothers and celebrity cameos from Carl Jung to Larry King, the novel received glowing reviews. And having written the story he wanted to tell, Ferguson says he has no interest in seeing the book butchered by moviemakers, so the film rights are not for sale. In 2008 he became a U.S. citizen, and in 2009 he wrote his autobiography, American on Purpose.

His sister Lynn is an actress who has appeared on two long-running British dramas, the cop show The Bill and the hospital drama No Angels, and she voiced the genius hen Mac in the animated Chicken Run with Mel Gibson. In the early 1990s he dated actress Fiona Fullerton, best known as a Bond girl from A View to a Kill. His wife, Megan Wallace-Cunningham, is a direct descendant of John and Abigail Adams. His ex-wife, Sascha Ferguson, is founder and proprietor of SpySchool, offering a curriculum of workout, bodybuilding, and defense classes teaching women about "the world of espionage; how to take out an assailant, climb up a building, rappel off a thirty foot cliff, ... [and] spy skills like firing a weapon and how to change your look with wigs and makeup". Ferguson and his ex-wife live two doors down the street from each other in Los Angeles, and share custody of their son.